12 January 2013

CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?

I often tell people to read books with their ears instead of using their eyes. Huh? Audiobooks! Instead of reading books the old way, get the books either in computer format or on CDs and have machines read the books to you. Great idea, but do I practice what I preach?I have this neat Mac app that can be used to make inventory of things. Books, music CDs, movies, etc. It's called Delicious Library. You can enter things by hand, but what makes it great is that you can use the computer's webcam to read barcodes and then pull down from the cloud all kinds of info about the items. Delicious also has a neat web publishing function, to MobileMe or FTP site, but it's late at night, I don't feel like setting it up, assuming my MobileMe account is still good for that. FTP? Fuhgeddaboutit! A screenshot will have to do. See below.I just created a section called Audiobooks and added items I "read" in recent memory. I am a bit disappointed that I only have 14 items, but at least that's 14 items I might otherwise not have read. Maybe I forgot to record a bunch of audiobooks.I am not a picky reader and usually pick up the books based on their genre, if I recognize the series, or if it sounds like something more famous (such as Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey, not to be confused with that other more titillating book), famous authors, or sometimes just to try to expand my interests. Not shown, because I still haven't finished, is The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Seeds of Rebellion by Brandon Mull. The Russian book I got from LibriVox as a bunch of MP3 files, which I can technically listened on my cell phone, but even the act of sending the files to the phone seems so painful I haven't gotten around to it. I'm really spoiled by Apple and iTune's fine syncing function. The Mull book I am up to Chapter 8, or disc 4, and will probably be done soon. It's really a teenage book that my son likes so I am reading to sorta accompany him. Note that The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, listened on audiocassettes back in the 80s or early 90s, was what introduced me to audiobooks. The sound effects made for the computer speech got me hooked. It was a novelty back then, what can I say...Have you "read" any audiobooks lately?